Basic HTML Version
70
winter
|
spr ing
principal violist with the New York Philharmonic, and clarinetist
David
Shifrin
(1968), former artistic director of the Chamber Music Society of
Lincoln Center.
The fellows arrive each June as young students, already accomplished
yet eager to improve, and leave in mid-August after eight weeks of
intensive study, practice, and performance, a good bit further along the
road to a professional career.
To help us capture an inside glimpse of that two-month effort, the
following three veterans of the program representing different eras and
varying resumés offered their unique perspectives of a summer spent at
the Music Academy of the West.
Thomas Hampson
the buildings and electricity came in,” he joked.
His time in Montecito was a formative period, and Hampson admits
that while it was his dream to come to the Music Academy, “I was very
ambitious but mostly intimidated at the start. It was a very heady time.
It was the first time I’d been around people my age who had the same
ambitions and abilities.”
Indeed, Hampson recalls, at that point he wasn’t even sure he wanted
to pursue opera as a career: “I believed I had the talent and the heart and
the brain, but I wanted to see what it was like to actually do it.”
The young singer found himself startled early on by a teacher who
confronted him.
“He was frustrated with my talent that lacked perspective. I was taken
aback by his harsh and pointed criticism. I didn’t handle it well at first,”
Hampson confesses.
But by the end of his first summer, Hampson was awarded with the
first Lotte Lehmann Medallion – honoring the late founder of the school
– for work in song repertoire.
“The coaches were fantastic, and my time there was a profound
experience,” he says.
Many years later, in 1994, Hampson was honored with the inaugural
annual Distinguished Alumni Award (discontinued after 2006), and also
served on the search committee that brought Marilyn Horne to campus
the following year to serve as the vocal program director. His ties to the
Academy continue to this day; Hampson has performed frequently in
town under the aegis of the Academy, on the Miraflores campus in 2007
and at UCSB in October 2009, conducting master classes for aspiring
singers each time.
“The Music Academy has adapted very well to changing times,” said
Hampson, who noted he would recommend the program to young
singers without reservation. “It’s definitely among the top places to go
study in the summer, and they have a much broader cross section of
instrumentalists [than were there in my time].”
And while his musical performances are what helped launch his
enviable career, Hampson treasures his memories of the environment
with similar pleasure.
“The quality of a private summer, a place to go and find out who
you are both as a person and an artist, and to be measured against
those of your own age, and to learn from masters who are well-chosen
for both their ability and sensitivity for working with young people
– it’s unmatched. All the avenues of my talent and all that I have
accomplished have some threads to the Music Academy of the West, and
always will. I can’t say enough wonderful things about it.”
C
onsidered one of the world’s leading baritones,
Thomas
Hampson
was a protégé of Leonard Bernstein, with whom
he compiled many recordings. His operatic repertoire covers some of
the most demanding roles in the genre, from the title roles in Mozart’s
“Don Giovanni,” Rossini’s “William Tell” and Ambroise Thomas’s
“Hamlet,” to Figaro in Rossini’s “Barber of Seville” and Germont in
Verdi’s “La Traviata”; Hampson won a Grammy for his recording of
Wagner’s Tannhäuser in 2003. But his talent also extends to art songs:
his renditions of works by the European masters Schubert, Mahler
and Strauss are rivaled only by a celebrated project with the Library of
Congress that reveals his passion to revive American song.
The baritone attended the Music Academy from Washington State
when he was in his early 20s in 1978-79 – “Just between the plans for
• M
usic
A
cademy
of
the
W
est
•